Resources

Build Versus Buy

Your organization wants to promote its events online. You're faced with a decision. Should you develop a website calendar in-house or pay a monthly subscription fee for Software as a Service?

If you consider what you get by leveraging Trumba Connect, a proven event content management system and application, we think you'll agree that you come out ahead by subscribing rather than building your own solution from scratch.

Quality

Since 2003, Trumba Corporation has dedicated itself to solving a problem: How to make event information available online so that businesses communicate their events effectively and consumers easily find and act on events that matter to them. By choosing to develop your own website calendar, you will face many of the same problems that Trumba has already solved.

A Trumba Connect subscription provides:

Dedicated development resources.

A team of talented developers is dedicated full time to providing the best solution available for publishing and promoting events online.

An intuitive editing environment makes it possible for anyone in your organization to add and update events, maintain email distribution lists, and more.

An innovative event publishing process.

When you publish events, you create a collection of design-quality, interactive widgets that you can copy and paste into your web pages.

Innovation

Developing a website calendar solution in-house takes you away from your organization's core business activities. Website calendars and event promotion are Trumba's core activities. By subscribing to Trumba Connect, you gain access to the most innovative and advanced event technology available.

Trumba Connect includes:

AJAX-based interactive event widgets.

The Trumba Connect publishing process results in AJAX-based interactive calendars and other event widgets that you deploy by copying and pasting JavaScript calls.

Customization.

You have full control over the appearance of your event widgets and the content of your events.

Events that site visitors can act on.

Visitors can add events to their personal calendars, set email and text message reminders, arrange to be notified about changes, forward events to friends, and more.

Support for three kinds of feeds.

Calendar visitors can set up RSS, iCal, and Atom feeds to automatically receive calendar updates.

An integrated email system.

Our email system, with real-time email address validation, allows you to automatically send upcoming events to people on distribution lists. We also constantly analyze outgoing email so we can immediately resolve spam list problems.

Event registration.

Trumba Connect includes support for invitations and open event registration.

Tools for monitoring calendar activity.

Reporting is integrated into Trumba Connect in the form of a graphical Publisher Dashboard.

Search engine optimization.

We take steps to improve the relevance of published calendars in Web search engine results.

Cost savings

A typical online application development project takes at least six months and involves a complex, costly series of steps, including research and learning, needs assessment, application interface design, database design, technology assessment, server and security setup, application building and testing, beta testing, and on-going support and maintenance.

By contrast, when you subscribe to Trumba Connect, you have:

Near zero start up costs.

After signing up for an account, you can go from an event data file to a published website calendar within an hour.

No large initial cash outlay.

With Trumba Connect, you pay by the month, which protects you in a number of ways. A monthly subscription cost is easier to incorporate into your budget than a large one-time outlay. You can cancel your subscription at any time without losing an initial investment.

Customer support, product support forums, and extensive Help files.

With a Trumba Connect subscription, you and others in your organization have email, phone, and online access to a range of customer and technical support options.

Zero infrastructure machine, management, and maintenance costs.

Building your own website calendar solution means providing redundant business critical servers that are secured against viruses, hackers, and power failures. It also means having a proper backup plan in place. Instead of developing that infrastructure yourself, rely on the one we already have in place.

Maintenance

It's not enough just to develop a home-grown website calendar solution. After it's developed, you have to maintain it by fixing bugs, installing patches, responding to feature requests, and more.

Subscribe to Trumba Connect and leave all of the maintenance problems to us. A subscription means:

Free updates and bug fixes.

Our developers devote themselves to fixing bugs and adding new features to Trumba Connect. We release new versions nearly every week and you automatically benefit from the improvements without downloading a thing.

Lots of control without the headaches.

Worried that subscribing means seeing Trumba splashed all over your website and events? We don't compromise your brand. Trumba's embedded calendars are ad- and attribution-free. You have control over the colors and fonts in your calendars and other event widgets at a very detailed level so you keep your brand at the forefront. You also have control over your events. Create as many event types and custom event fields as you need.

On-going quality assurance.

We maintain a fully staffed quality assurance and testing team. The team not only thoroughly tests weekly bug fixes and new features but also ensures that Trumba Connect works with new products before the products are officially released. Trumba Connect currently works with all major web browsers, including Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 7 and the new Windows Vista® operating system.

Set up and then let go.

After your IT group sets things up, you can turn event maintenance over to others. The intuitive Trumba Connect editing environment makes it easy for anyone in your organization to add and update events, maintain email distribution lists, and more.

Security and reliability

Highly qualified operations personnel. Dedicated firewalls. Around-the-clock monitoring. These are the very costly but crucial components of a secure online application. Why make the investment or put your data at risk when you can rely on us?

A Trumba Connect subscription includes:

Physical security.

Our production equipment is housed in a state-of-the-art, seismically-reinforced colocation facility that exceeds California seismic zone 3 standards. It is locked down behind a multi-layered, high-security perimeter that is professionally guarded on site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We contract with an independent third party company to run periodic vulnerability scans on our external and internal systems.

State-of-the-art infrastructure.

We host your data on an industry-leading Internap network infrastructure that includes intelligent routing through all major Internet backbones to achieve the highest availability and the shortest response times.

Routine data backups.

We have a dedicated backup server farm that continually replicates customer data. Backups are secured offsite.

We have a fully staffed, highly qualified Operations team. We monitor the site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Our team is on standby to respond within minutes if we receive notification of site outage or severe performance problems.